Scholarly record

HIGHER EDUCATION IN POST-COMMUNIST HUNGARY AND ROMANIA – A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Zoltan Zakota, Istvan Nemeth

Abstract

Romania and Hungary, two former dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe, have started on their post-communist project having pretty many similarities. At least, in the beginning they adopted the same soviet model of social organization and similar institutional framework. Although, until the end of the regime they matured following divergent paths, some societal subsystems evolved in quite similar ways in both countries. On the one side of the border Hungary was boiling its “goulash communism” while living in “the merriest barrack”, on the other side Romania was building one of the most gruesome despotisms in the modern Europe, called “The Golden Age”. We consider, that one of the fields in which the discrepancies between them were not so prominent was the education, especially the higher one. After the fall of communism, the realm of academe underwent some radical changes in both countries (e.g. the appearance of private universities or the disappearing of quotas), but subsequently the two countries had again a period of nearing. This was due, primarily, to their efforts of joining the European Union, especially to the adoption, in 1999, of the so-called Bologna Declaration, and so adhering to the European Higher Education Area. The process of harmonisation continued in a rather hectic and sinuous way until 2010, when the newly elected coalition got absolute majority in the Hungarian parliament. After that moment, centralisation and interventionism became keywords in the Hungarian higher education too, thus leading to a gaping distance between the two systems again. The aim of our paper is to analyse from a comparative point of view the systems of higher education in both countries, after the fall of the totalitarian regimes. The complexity and the manifold character of the question makes it impossible to do an exhaustive analysis of it, so our paper will deal, primarily, with the quantitative analysis of the available data. Enquiring other aspects of the research field, such as the legal or the economic ones, the conformity to the European values, provisions and expectations, efficiency issues, or even the ethical and moral ones could be subject of separate studies. Regarding our sources of data, the comparisons are based on official figures provided by the national statistical institutes and the Eurostat.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SGEMSOCIAL2015/B12/S3.061

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